USC vs. UCLA is seldom boring

UCLA and USC bashed each other's banners out Wednesday, in the two major revenue sports, from sunrise to well past Rick Neuheisel screaming to a pumped up halftime crowd at Pauley Pavilion.

UCLA basketball was embarrassing USC basketball, 44-21.

"We're going to the top!" said the man in the beige jacket who last year coached UCLA football to 4-8.

Neuheisel didn't say exactly when his program was going to get there.

With the Lakers literally out of the country, February in L.A. can't get much better than this.

Wednesday was like a sprawling bar fight, except in reverse. It started outside on the mean streets of football recruiting and then moved inside the saloon doors of a fabled basketball arena.

"This building was electric," UCLA Coach Ben Howland said after the Bruins' 76-60 win.

There were carpet shocks and hand-checks and hard picks and double switches going on all day, everywhere.

Sometime before midnight and after deadline, a Bruin somewhere probably slugged a Trojan and called it a day.

Steals? Someone should have called Sgt. Friday.

UCLA, in football, in the late afternoon, picked USC of a top recruit, receiver Randall Carroll, from Los Angeles Cathedral.

The Bruins really pulled a fast one because, not only does Carroll share the same name with USC's football coach, the kid is supposedly the swiftest thing on two feet in California.

At the basketball game, just before halftime, UCLA center Alfred Aboya wrestled a ball away from USC's Taj Gibson and pitched it to freshman Jrue Holiday for a layup that gave the Bruins a 23-point lead at the break.

USC had its share of steals too, in fact 13 in the basketball game to UCLA's nine.

In football, the Trojans won back defensive back Byron Moore, from Harbor City Narbonne, who originally committed to UCLA, switched to USC, waffled on that choice, and then officially moved back to USC's side.

In basketball, UCLA got the Pauley crowd home in time for KTLA's 10 o'clock news.

UCLA's Nikola (Dragovic) outplayed USC's Nikola (Vucevic) by a long shot, in fact a lot of them, with Dragovic's four three-point baskets in the first half effectively dictating what kind of night it was going to be.

With about 7:47 left, Bruins wing Josh Shipp looked like a Boeing jumbo jet when he went wheels up for the slam dunk that made a comeback impossible.

"We definitely feel the energy," Shipp said. "It was there from the tip-off."